Since Ava DuVernay became a Hollywood household name in 2014, thanks to the breakout success of her third feature, Selma, the director has used her fame to become a change agent in the entertainment industry. She’s rebranded and expanded her distribution company, Array, to champion films by people of color. She's become the first black female director to helm a $100 million movie. Now she’s co-created, executive produced, and directed several episodes of Queen Sugar, a new TV series on OWN based on the Natalie Baszile book of the same name. The show, which revolves around three siblings who must band together to run their late father’s sugarcane farm in Louisiana, aired its first episode last Tuesday—but broke barriers while still in production, when its creative team decreed that each of its 13 episodes would be directed by a woman. Few—if any—other shows can boast of such an achievement (though Amazon’s Transparentcomes close).

“For her to be able to not just advocate for women in film, and people of color in film, but to really [do it] just in a way that is matter of fact and unapologetic, I think, is fabulous,” Baszile tells Vanity Fair.

DuVernay has a cheerleader-like (emphasis on ”leader”) quality when she talks about the people involved in her projects. She seems determined to share every inch of the spotlight, pulling in as many collaborators as possible to stand in the glow with her. A response about her all-female directing staff turns into a speech lavishing praise on each, one by one: “So Yong Kim—how many Korean women filmmakers [are] out there getting their directing on that you know by name? Neema Barnette, the first black woman ever to direct an episode of television, sitcom television,” DuVernay says. “Kat Candler, a great star of SXSW, at Sundance. Salli Richardson-Whitfield, a former actress who was an actress in my first film who just has such a directorial eye just in her everyday life and had been shadowing people, trying to get an episode of television, [but] no one letting her do it. She directed beautiful episodes. Victoria Mahoney, Tanya Hamilton, Tina Mabry.”

She’s the same way with the stars of her show. She wonders aloud how many episodes it will take for the Internet to fall in love with its 22-year-old star, Kofi Siriboe, who plays rough-around-the-edges Ralph Angel. (She affectionally calls him “Kofi, my Kofi!”). She heaps praise on Dawn-Lyen Gardner, who plays bougie older sister Charley. Gardner, a Juilliard graduate, attended the prestigious school around the same time as her co-star Rutina Wesley, in addition to now-established movie stars Jessica Chastain and Oscar Isaac, Duvernay points out. In the first episode of Queen Sugar, Gardner nails a goose-bump-inducing scene at a rowdy basketball game after uncovering a nasty secret. (It would be a spoiler to say more.) Because of the extras and time it took to set up the scene, Gardner had to “put it all in the first take,” according to her director. So she did just that.

“When you have a great, classically trained actor as she is, who’s so committed to this part, you have magic,” DuVernay says. It’s the kind of soaring promotional speak DuVernay likely perfected in her former career at the head of a Hollywood public-relations agency. But there’s no hint of faux affection—just a reverence for everyone on the show’s team. It is also a reminder that, aside from Wesley, Queen Sugar’s biggest stars are behind the camera. Viewers will likely be meeting Siriboe and Gardner for the first time.

Dawn-Lyen Gardner in the pilot episode of Queen Sugar.

Courtesy of OWN.

DuVernay speaks just as proudly of her friend Oprah Winfrey, who in addition to owning Queen Sugar’s home network, serves as an executive producer of the series. OWN renewed for a second season before the first episode even launched, but DuVernay is quick to squash narratives of special treatment. Instead, she’d like to remind everyone that Winfrey is, at her core, an artist.

“She’s an actress, she’s a storyteller,” she says. “She’s made a katrillion hours of television, and she knows about stories.”

And there’s a lot at stake for the network with Queen Sugar. The network stumbled when it first launched five years ago, unable to hold viewers who had otherwise dutifully followed Oprah’s every move for a quarter of a century. There were layoffs and a hyped-up Rosie O’Donnell talk show that was canceled after six months. About a year after OWN launched, reports were predictingits impending doom.

“People were counting me out . . . I thought, Do I not get credit for the 25 years?” Winfrey asked in a 2013 interview. In another interview, she added that if she’d known launching a network was this hard, she “might have done something else.”

A variety of Tyler Perry productions, feel-good programs like Super Soul Sunday, and bingeable self-help shows like Iyanla: Fix My Life and Dr. Phil have since put it on more stable ground. But Queen Sugar, coupled with the juicy new family drama Greenleaf, represents the network’s big leap into serious drama—and the competitive world of prestige television. That ambition, coupled with the fact that OWN is “the only network owned by a black woman,” was enough to reel DuVernay in.

“It’s an artist-owned network, truly. And yes, there was nothing on the network like it, but that didn’t concern me, because I know that before, like, four years ago, Amazon was the place where I bought books. Now I’m watching TV shows on it,” she says. “Destinations can morph and change.”

When Queen Sugar debuted last Tuesday, it became the second-highest-rated premiere in the network’s short history, beaten only by the June premiere of Greenleaf, which featured an appearance from Winfrey herself. At Queen Sugar’s premiere in Los Angeles on August 29, the queen of all media got to have her own little moment of vindication.

“When she introduced the show, she said, ‘You know, I’m really happy tonight, because it really proves never count me out.’ And then she strutted off the stage!” DuVernay recalls. “It was like Kendrick [Lamar] dropped the mic or something. People were buggin’ out!”

Sugar is also already having a positive ripple effect for its female directors. Following their turns helming the show, several have booked network series like American Crime and Grey’s Anatomy, as well as Netflix shows like the upcoming Dear White People and Gypsy. Show-runners and studio executives, whom DuVernay declined to name, have also reached out to her. And who knows: maybe one day, her approach might even inspire Game of Thrones show-runners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, whom DuVernay has playfully mocked in the past for not hiring female directors for multiple seasons of their hit HBO series.

“It’s like someone you love who betrays you, that’s how I feel,” she says with a laugh. “I ride for Game of Thrones, but then someone told me that a woman hasn’t directed that thing for two seasons.” (Actually, including the series’ upcoming seventh outing, it will have been three seasons since Thrones featured a female director.) “I didn’t know that it was cheating on me in this way until someone told me, and it really hurt. If they can have all men, then we can have all women for as long as we want.”

That unapologetic approach is one of the reasons author Baszile was excited to work with DuVernay, whom she met long before Oprah (though they eventually got together and had a sleepover at the mogul's Montecito estate). She remembers visiting the set of Queen Sugar and feeling galvanized at the sight of an inclusive crew of women and male and female people of color “who are really professionally at the top of their game.”

“She’s trying to just represent black culture and black people and people of color in a more varied and nuanced way,” Baszile says.

A still from Queen Sugar.

Courtesy of OWN.

With Queen Sugar’s first season wrapped, DuVernay is currently working on an adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time for Disney, which recently made her the first black female filmmaker to helm a $100 million movie. But DuVernay says she didn’t focus on the glass-ceiling moment. The budget, she says, is more about “being able to take your time with the story, have more days to shoot, have more toys to play with, be able to go to more places to get the story, you know?”

The movie will have a mixed-race cast, making it a diversion from past adaptations. Winfrey has already signed on, while Mindy Kalingis in talks for a role; a casting call for the film’s main child and teenage parts specified they will not be played by white actors. Though it’s easy to imagine some studio hand-wringing about that, DuVernay says Disney was a fabulous partner in this regard. “The very first meeting, I said, ‘This is how I see the story,’” she says. “They were like, ‘Yup, good, O.K. So what do you need?’”

“I don’t think it would have happened 10 years ago, but you know, it’s happening now,” she continues. “When I think of someone like Julie Dash [the first black female filmmaker to see her movie get a wide theatrical release] and I think of just her great vision, her great talent—just an extraordinarily brilliant woman who might’ve been in those same conversations 10, 20 years ago—the outcome would have been very different. So when I’m heralded for [being] the first to do this, first to do that, it’s just the time. It’s not me. If she was in this time, she would be enjoying the same fruits.”

Rutina Wesley in an episode of Queen Sugar.

Courtesy of OWN.

Though she may try to pin some of her success on timing, DuVernay’s career is also skyrocketing because, frankly, she’s very good at her job. Each of her films have earned positive reviews—and in the case of Selma, close to universal acclaim. The trend has held with Queen Sugar, with critics noting the series’s emotional range and carefully paced dramatic plot. It’s also aesthetically satisfying; each frame is full of lush beauty, from the first scene of the pilot onward. The show opens with a close-up of Wesley as she lies naked in bed, her back covered only by impossibly shiny dreadlocks. A sleepy lover rests by her side. It feels at once intimate and sinfully voyeuristic, but its intention is deeper than that.

“Whenever you go to a movie, look at the first image, ’cause most filmmakers are really trying to say something,” she starts. “This one I wanted to be on a brown-skinned sister.”

She decided upon the shot even before Wesley was cast—but once the actress was brought on and the character’s look was established, including her locks and the actress’s own real neck and rib tattoos, it felt like DuVernay’s vision had finally clicked into place.